A year in books: Staffers share their favorite reads from 2013

The holidays are here and winter is upon us. Maybe you've got a gift card burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe someone gave you a new device that takes the paper out of books. Maybe you need a good novel to take into hibernation with you.

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By Rick holmes

seacoastonline.com

By Rick holmes

Posted Jan. 5, 2014 at 2:00 AM

By Rick holmes

Posted Jan. 5, 2014 at 2:00 AM

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The holidays are here and winter is upon us. Maybe you've got a gift card burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe someone gave you a new device that takes the paper out of books. Maybe you need a good novel to take into hibernation with you.

Whatever your reason, 'tis the season for reading, and we're here to help. Continuing a year-end tradition, I've asked some staff writers and op-ed contributors to recall the best books they read in 2013. They don't have to have been published in 2013 — great books don't come with expiration dates — but they worked their magic on at least one reader this year, and may do the same for you in 2014.

"Flight Behavior"

Barbara Kingsolver

Every year, on All Saints Day — Nov. 1 — millions of monarch butterflies return to central Mexico. Except this year, they didn't show up. It's a shocking milestone in the collapse of a species.

That real crisis is at the center of Barbara Kingsolver's novel, "Flight Behavior," which anticipated the milestone. The story is set in a small town in east Tennessee, where the lost monarch migration finds a temporary home.

Kingsolver tells stories with science. In "Flight Behavior," as in her also excellent "Prodigal Summer," the natural world is both real and metaphor, mirrored in the lives of richly-drawn characters. Some find the first chapter off-putting, but stick with it for a satisfying, ultimately hopeful, story about human metamorphosis amid an environmental disaster.

— RICK HOLMES

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane"

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is that rare writer who can display equal brilliance in children's literature (see "Coraline" or "The Graveyard Book") and adult fiction (see "Neverwhere" or "American Gods"). His latest novel, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," straddles these two genres with a tale about a boyhood encounter with the fantastical.

The story is about a man remembering a series of incidents with some odd neighbors that occurred when he was 7 years old. The story quickly — and at under 200 pages this whole book is a quick read — gets into the otherworldly realm where Gaiman thrives. His stories, which are best described as modern fairy tales, are so engaging because they populate a fantasy world that co-exists with the real world. Unlike say, "The Hobbit" or the "Lord of the Rings" stories, where the fantasy land is contained to itself, Gaiman's stories put characters in battles or allegiance with alternate realities within our own universe.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" plays that game superbly and dances with the subject of childhood memories, their fuzzy details and permanent stamps of emotion. It's a story that pivots on the obvious questions about magic: Did that really happen? What did I really see? And then dives headlong into the answer we most want to hear.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" is not the kind of epic journey that Gaiman wrought with "American Gods" but it is more substantial than the surprisingly creepy children's book "Coraline." If you are looking for a short adventure, a traipse into some lyrical storytelling, you can't go wrong with this little gem.

— ROB HANEISEN

"Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith"

Kathleen Norris.

The most important book for me this year would have to be Kathleen Norris's "Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith." For all a book with such a title would be easy to suspect of proselytizing or didactic intent, just about the opposite is what came across to me.

Norris doesn't defend faith or stake its turf in some argument with doubt or disbelief. Instead she openly and honestly contemplates the substance of her own faith via the language it employs, as it sounds deep within a poet's sensibility. Word by word, she unpacks terms like "incarnation," "idolatry" and "evangelism" — discharging baggage, finding fresh meaning. With each very personal definition she manages candid testimony to a brave and purposeful spirituality that is as intelligent as it is inspiring.

Not every word she shares is easy or perfect, but as she explains, "(o)ur ridiculously fallible language becomes a lesson in how God's grace works despite and even through our human frailty. We will never get the words exactly right. There will always be room for imperfection, for struggle, growth and change. And this is as it should be."

Reading Norris's insights like that, just one word came to mind: Amen.

— TOM DRISCOLL

"Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps"

Greg Palast.

Greg Palast's 2012 book begins with the premise that election strategy over the last decade or so has as much to do with suppressing the vote count as winning over voters.

The trail of documents and disenfranchisement takes Palast, a freelance investigative reporter, from Florida to Colorado to New Mexico and back in time to the Clinton presidency. The plot even crosses into the collapse of Detroit.

Written almost in the manner of a detective story and with the authority of a seasoned investigator, Palast's book weaves together a complex web of money and power in an admirably logical and articulate style that will prick your sense of fairness and bend your view of political influence.

"Billionaires and Ballot Bandits" provides a broader, more sinister context for the push in some states to add voter ID laws even as it presses home that when it comes to big money and political power even the law plays second fiddle.

— PHIL MADDOCKS

"Return of the Native"

Thomas Hardy

I rarely read tragedies solely for the fall. I'm not flipping ahead just to learn the details of that prolonged plummet, whether it comes in the form of an unfortunate death or loss of fortune.

No, I read tragedies such as Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native" for the intriguing characters woven within — in this case, Eustacia Vye, the rebellious, imperious, melancholic goddess of Egdon Heath. Holden Caulfield, himself a born rebel, famously said he "likes that Eustacia Vye." And so do I: mainly for her fearlessness and her ardor. One has to respect both her futile effort to escape unforgiving Egdon — as she dreams of rich cities — and her troubled romance with its returning son, Clym Yeobright. She at once tries to flee and clings to the wasteland she so abhors. This doesn't end well. But thankfully in the meantime, the reader can marvel at the undertaking.

Fifty years after President John Kennedy's assassination, Priscilla Johnson McMillan's compelling account of Lee Harvey Oswald's improbable life — and death — through the prism of his troubled marriage to his Russian wife makes sense of a senseless murder that likely changed U.S. history.

A Russian-speaking journalist, McMillan interviewed Oswald when he tried to defect to the Soviet Union. She served as an aide to Kennedy and later spent months with Oswald's widow to write the definitive inside story of America's greatest unsolved mystery.

Incorporating prodigious research and her own personal involvements with the three principals, Johnson McMillan's "Marina and Lee'' fuses insightful history, psychology and investigative reporting to convincingly suggest that a pathetic loner with grandiose delusions and a mail-order carbine could impose his personal demons onto the nation's life.

Whether you adhere to the "lone gunman theory'' or can't stop watching Oliver Stone's "J.F.K.,'' "Marina and Lee'' provides fascinating reading that suggests that even a misfit with coincidence on his side could tear down Camelot.

— CHRIS BERGERON

"The Renaissance"

Will Durant

It would be an exaggeration to say that I "read" this extraordinary volume this year. Its 727 pages, densely packed with the chronicle of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, are a historical, social and cultural romp through an age when the west awakened to the glories of classical Greece and Rome. It would, however, be fair to say I dipped once again into a volume so rich in insight and alive to its time as to stir the soul and imagination in equal measure.

Part of a series of 11 volumes called "The Story of Civilization" and intended for the popular market, "The Renaissance" and its companions been given short shrift by academics. Yet to enter into the world of the Medicis, Florentines and Romans guided by the wise hand of Will Durant is to experience wonders beyond measure. For those who believe, as Winston Churchill once observed, that the only way to see far into the future is to first look long into the past, this book is an invaluable companion.

— PETER GOLDEN

"Servants"

Lucy Lethbridge.

Best? No. Page-turner? Not exactly. What made me keep going with Lucy Lethbridge's "Servants,'' a history of "downstairs'' Britain in the past 150 years, was the occasional reflection of America in 2013.

Apparently the 1911 bill that could well have been dubbed "Lloyd George Care,'' mandating medical coverage as well as unemployment insurance, was about as well received as "Obamacare.''

"The proposals unleashed fury from both employers and their servants,'' Lethbridge writes. Cabinet Minister and future Prime Minister David "Lloyd George retaliated to the storm of hostility by sending lecturers all over the country to address meetings and explain what the act might mean in effect.''

Loyal "Downton Abbey'' viewers, or those who devoured "Upstairs, Downstairs,'' won't find too many surprises in descriptions of life for the "downstairs'' employees, but the history book does explain why England lagged behind the rest of Europe in embracing household technology for much of the 20th century: It was often cheaper to have a servant do the cleaning than invest in something like a vacuum cleaner, and besides, that's how it had always been done.

The documentation of the intimacy and iciness of the relationship between servants and those they served might not be a page-turner, but it does serve up some food for thought.

— JULIA SPITZ

"The Graveyard Book"

Neil Gaiman.

"The Graveyard Book" is written as a children's fiction book, with undercurrents of wickedness to keep the adult reader intrigued. Think "Jungle Book" and "Peter Pan" before Disney got hold of the originals. The star character, a living boy named Nobody Owens, is violently orphaned, then raised by ghosts. The story isn't told in a straight line — sometimes Nobody's adventures seem to stray off the main plot — but it's better this way. Gaiman combines dry humor with whimsical plots and characters, drawing the reader into an imaginative and mischievous world that challenges the perception of "normal."

This was the first novel by Gaiman I read, but I cruised through three more by the man — if dust jackets are to be believed, even Stephen King considers him to be a stunning storyteller — before my book budget petered out for the year.

— ALISON MCCALL

"American Hipster"

Hilary Holladay.

In a year that saw three movies about Jack Kerouac including "On The Road,'' Hilary Holladay's biography of Herbert Huncke opens a fascinating window on the hustler, jailbird and junkie whose underground life inspired the chroniclers of what came to be called the Beat Generation.

An English professor at James Madison University, Holladay wrote "American Hipster: A Life of Herbert Huncke, the Times Square Hustler Who Inspired the Beat Generation.'' It's an intriguing saga of a petty criminal whose adventures inspired Kerouac and others whose books triggered cultural changes still reverberating today.

Born to a respectable family in Greenfield, Mass., Huncke became everything mainstream America despised: a charming vagrant who sold sex and drugs and stole from friends. A raconteur of the 1940s Times Square demimonde who fascinated aspiring writers like Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Huncke described his existential weariness as "beat,'' meaning broke, exhausted and hopeless, which Kerouac transformed into an indictment of Eisenhower era conformity and Cold War anxiety. Without Huncke, there might have been no Kerouac or the consequent social rebellion and all that led to. Holladay's intriguing book rescues a nearly forgotten nobody who deserves to be remembered.